My Little Slice of Hell
A Lurid Stream of Torment
1. Last week, talking about Polish theatre, I referred to a character in Roman Polanski's film The Tenant as a "tranny". (In fact, the man, played by Polanski himself, dresses up as the former occupant of his apartment, possessed by her spirit.)
2. Brigitte Godot, a commenter with a blank LiveJournal, informed me yesterday in a comment that this term is offensive to transsexuals and went on to suggest that I'm probably unaware of the multiplicity of genders beyond the male / female binary. As someone who's had sexual relations with a transsexual, I'm perfectly aware of this multiplicity. Although I'd prefer to say that there's a fluid identity-continuum between two fixed biological genders rather than a plurality of genders.
3. So I refer the commenter to a Click Opera entry in which I wonder what would happen if there were 12 official genders instead of just two. I conclude, there, that this would lead to a lot of in-fighting because of Freud's narcissism of minor difference.
4. Difference is the important word here. As that entry says, quoting Sophia Phoca, the shift from feminism to postfeminism in the late 60s in Paris meant a shift from a quest for women's equality with men to the celebration of women's difference from men.
5. However, if you remove the idea of the pre-eminence of men (The Man as "the thing to be different from" or "the thing to be equal to"), what you get is a highly unstable system in which everyone asserts their own differences from everyone else. A baroque game ensues, of hair-paring self-definition, self-assertion, endless schism, and an overconcern with "the stigma treadmill". This becomes a politics we're all too familiar with, concerned with the policing of labels, and endless attempts to make other people -- accused of insensitivity and disrespect -- conform to our self-definitions.
6. Brigitte Godot isn't interested in theory. She says I'm "evading admitting direct culpability" by sending her "to some ancient post commenting on some pseud's ivory tower blather on post-something or other drivel". Ivory tower, pseud, blather, drivel... they don't exactly resonate with respect, do they? What does it mean, that the author of Postfeminism for Beginners is derided so savagely by someone demanding a respectful terminology for herself?
7. Godot goes on to suggest that there's a slippery slope, "in the real world", between using the word "tranny" and murdering transsexuals: "I'm talking about the real world effect such terms have on the thousand and one genders that aren't clearly male or female, not intellectual mind games that torture sentences to wring the subtext out of the banal. This November 20 was Transgender Remembrance Day, honoring all those murdered for their lack of gender conformity. Tranny Day to you, mate. Sorry I missed your post on the subject, I was too busy mourning the dead."
8. I google to see whether "tranny" is generally considered offensive and find a Boston Herald headline Wife-killing tranny denied electrolysis for time being and a Wikipedia article which says "the transgender community typically use the short form "trans", or simply "T" as a substitution for the full word "transsexual", e.g. TS, trans guy, trans dyke, T-folk, trans folk. Some may even use terms that have become controversial to some, such as tranny and/or trans, despite others considering these terms to be offensive. Those who do use these terms claim that they are diminishing the power of the term as an insult..."
9. I reply politely: "My point is that I'm quite aware of the multiplicity of genders, but that I think there's an inherent flaw in PC identity politics, which is that fine-slicing personal identity definitions -- and investing ever more in angry, self-righteous policing of labels and etiquettes -- is six political steps backward. This isn't ivory tower at all, it's very practical. As I put it in Three conflicts summarised, describing a conflict between RWOCs (Radical Women of Color) and black feminists:
"Here, enacted before our very eyes, is exactly why oppositional politics tends to disintegrate into bitter internecine squabbling -- much to the delight of the bigots it should instead be attacking. These people need to get behind a common cause, and preferably one unrelated to the assertion of ever-more-baroque personal identity differences."
10. I then say that insisting that the word "tranny" be seen as offensive and insulting might be politically counter-productive and even reactionary, a way of:
a) inducing guilt in an ally
b) alienating an ally
c) splitting a united front against bigots
d) actually re-introducing stigma into the whole idea of transgenderism
11. In last Friday's Judgment of Paris post, I suggested that my problem with late-period identity politics is that "there is a lot of sexism built into anti-sexism".
12. This relates to what I've jokingly called Humperson's Third Law of Meta, which states that:
"No critical statement is exempt from its own strictures. Every statement which seeks to summarize and critique a pre-existing statement will tend to exemplify, in itself, the things it deplores in the original statement, thus opening itself up to the same critique, and so on, recursively. And incrementally, for a summary of a statement tends to exemplify its faults more succinctly and intensely." As a critique of sexism, anti-sexism is open to the charge that it incorporates and intensifies the very thing it claims to combat.
13. This also relates to what I was saying in my entry The arrow and the frame, which suggested that an expressed opinion was less important than the framing presuppositions of an argument. In other words -- and as Google Adwords tends to confirm when it advertises racist products next to an anti-racist conversation -- stating you're against sexism or racism is less important than being "on the same page" with racists and sexists in the general framing of the debate. Letting them, in other words, set the agenda.
14. Adam Curtis' Century of the Self gives a very valuable account of how the counterculture of the 1960s turned, in the 1970s, into narcissism and schism, both political and personal (EST, in particular, saw many reaching the revelation that the self is both everything and nothing), and how this "self-actualization" led fairly seamlessly into the nihilistic consumer-entrepreneurial ideology of the 1980s.
15. It's this narcissism which I think underlies the late-period identity politics which pops up in my comment columns so much. It's not so much "womanist" as "mannerist", both because it's a late, decadent development of 1960s radicalism and because it's obsessed with manners. Identity politics in the 60s and 70s fought for the public visibility of people who were different. In the 80s and 90s -- the Reagan/Thatcher years -- identity politics flipped polarities and entered its PC phase, becoming a campaign for the invisibility of differences. Late identity politics dovetails with Reagan/Thatcher politics: ban public advocacy of homosexuality, don't offend people, keep differences invisible, change language, assume and police stigma.
16. I am X, and I am different from Y. Other people are ignorant of the difference between X and Y. They must be educated. People, you must call me X and respect my difference from yourself, and from Y. You must refer to me by the term I have chosen to refer to myself by, and stay tuned for any changes I choose to make in this label, and new terms you must use to describe me -- those new terms which the stigma treadmill or reclamation of previously-taboo terms may, from time to time, make it necessary for me to substitute. If you self-define as X, you may participate in the reclamation of previously-taboo terms. If you don't, you must simply wait for us to tell you it's okay again to use terms like "queer" or "fag".
17. It's not so much "political correctness gone mad" as "rad gone trad".
18. Thin-sliced, baroque identity politics and the stigma-policing that is its main praxis is as far from a radical progressive politics as it's possible to get. Two steps forward, six euphemisms back.
2. Brigitte Godot, a commenter with a blank LiveJournal, informed me yesterday in a comment that this term is offensive to transsexuals and went on to suggest that I'm probably unaware of the multiplicity of genders beyond the male / female binary. As someone who's had sexual relations with a transsexual, I'm perfectly aware of this multiplicity. Although I'd prefer to say that there's a fluid identity-continuum between two fixed biological genders rather than a plurality of genders.
3. So I refer the commenter to a Click Opera entry in which I wonder what would happen if there were 12 official genders instead of just two. I conclude, there, that this would lead to a lot of in-fighting because of Freud's narcissism of minor difference.
4. Difference is the important word here. As that entry says, quoting Sophia Phoca, the shift from feminism to postfeminism in the late 60s in Paris meant a shift from a quest for women's equality with men to the celebration of women's difference from men.
5. However, if you remove the idea of the pre-eminence of men (The Man as "the thing to be different from" or "the thing to be equal to"), what you get is a highly unstable system in which everyone asserts their own differences from everyone else. A baroque game ensues, of hair-paring self-definition, self-assertion, endless schism, and an overconcern with "the stigma treadmill". This becomes a politics we're all too familiar with, concerned with the policing of labels, and endless attempts to make other people -- accused of insensitivity and disrespect -- conform to our self-definitions.
6. Brigitte Godot isn't interested in theory. She says I'm "evading admitting direct culpability" by sending her "to some ancient post commenting on some pseud's ivory tower blather on post-something or other drivel". Ivory tower, pseud, blather, drivel... they don't exactly resonate with respect, do they? What does it mean, that the author of Postfeminism for Beginners is derided so savagely by someone demanding a respectful terminology for herself?
7. Godot goes on to suggest that there's a slippery slope, "in the real world", between using the word "tranny" and murdering transsexuals: "I'm talking about the real world effect such terms have on the thousand and one genders that aren't clearly male or female, not intellectual mind games that torture sentences to wring the subtext out of the banal. This November 20 was Transgender Remembrance Day, honoring all those murdered for their lack of gender conformity. Tranny Day to you, mate. Sorry I missed your post on the subject, I was too busy mourning the dead."
8. I google to see whether "tranny" is generally considered offensive and find a Boston Herald headline Wife-killing tranny denied electrolysis for time being and a Wikipedia article which says "the transgender community typically use the short form "trans", or simply "T" as a substitution for the full word "transsexual", e.g. TS, trans guy, trans dyke, T-folk, trans folk. Some may even use terms that have become controversial to some, such as tranny and/or trans, despite others considering these terms to be offensive. Those who do use these terms claim that they are diminishing the power of the term as an insult..."
9. I reply politely: "My point is that I'm quite aware of the multiplicity of genders, but that I think there's an inherent flaw in PC identity politics, which is that fine-slicing personal identity definitions -- and investing ever more in angry, self-righteous policing of labels and etiquettes -- is six political steps backward. This isn't ivory tower at all, it's very practical. As I put it in Three conflicts summarised, describing a conflict between RWOCs (Radical Women of Color) and black feminists:
"Here, enacted before our very eyes, is exactly why oppositional politics tends to disintegrate into bitter internecine squabbling -- much to the delight of the bigots it should instead be attacking. These people need to get behind a common cause, and preferably one unrelated to the assertion of ever-more-baroque personal identity differences."
10. I then say that insisting that the word "tranny" be seen as offensive and insulting might be politically counter-productive and even reactionary, a way of:
a) inducing guilt in an ally
b) alienating an ally
c) splitting a united front against bigots
d) actually re-introducing stigma into the whole idea of transgenderism
11. In last Friday's Judgment of Paris post, I suggested that my problem with late-period identity politics is that "there is a lot of sexism built into anti-sexism".
12. This relates to what I've jokingly called Humperson's Third Law of Meta, which states that:
"No critical statement is exempt from its own strictures. Every statement which seeks to summarize and critique a pre-existing statement will tend to exemplify, in itself, the things it deplores in the original statement, thus opening itself up to the same critique, and so on, recursively. And incrementally, for a summary of a statement tends to exemplify its faults more succinctly and intensely." As a critique of sexism, anti-sexism is open to the charge that it incorporates and intensifies the very thing it claims to combat.
13. This also relates to what I was saying in my entry The arrow and the frame, which suggested that an expressed opinion was less important than the framing presuppositions of an argument. In other words -- and as Google Adwords tends to confirm when it advertises racist products next to an anti-racist conversation -- stating you're against sexism or racism is less important than being "on the same page" with racists and sexists in the general framing of the debate. Letting them, in other words, set the agenda.
14. Adam Curtis' Century of the Self gives a very valuable account of how the counterculture of the 1960s turned, in the 1970s, into narcissism and schism, both political and personal (EST, in particular, saw many reaching the revelation that the self is both everything and nothing), and how this "self-actualization" led fairly seamlessly into the nihilistic consumer-entrepreneurial ideology of the 1980s.
15. It's this narcissism which I think underlies the late-period identity politics which pops up in my comment columns so much. It's not so much "womanist" as "mannerist", both because it's a late, decadent development of 1960s radicalism and because it's obsessed with manners. Identity politics in the 60s and 70s fought for the public visibility of people who were different. In the 80s and 90s -- the Reagan/Thatcher years -- identity politics flipped polarities and entered its PC phase, becoming a campaign for the invisibility of differences. Late identity politics dovetails with Reagan/Thatcher politics: ban public advocacy of homosexuality, don't offend people, keep differences invisible, change language, assume and police stigma.
16. I am X, and I am different from Y. Other people are ignorant of the difference between X and Y. They must be educated. People, you must call me X and respect my difference from yourself, and from Y. You must refer to me by the term I have chosen to refer to myself by, and stay tuned for any changes I choose to make in this label, and new terms you must use to describe me -- those new terms which the stigma treadmill or reclamation of previously-taboo terms may, from time to time, make it necessary for me to substitute. If you self-define as X, you may participate in the reclamation of previously-taboo terms. If you don't, you must simply wait for us to tell you it's okay again to use terms like "queer" or "fag".
17. It's not so much "political correctness gone mad" as "rad gone trad".
18. Thin-sliced, baroque identity politics and the stigma-policing that is its main praxis is as far from a radical progressive politics as it's possible to get. Two steps forward, six euphemisms back.
Monday's International Emmy Awards saw a win for Japan in the Comedy category. NHK's production of Hoshi Shinichi's Short Shorts presents "one author's tales of strange worlds, told with an odd accent, grownup fairy tales". Shinichi, who died in 1997, wrote over a thousand of these "short shorts", stories just three or four pages long. He's often called a sci-fi writer, but most of his fictions are earthbound, and concern parallel worlds where strange things happen. Here, for instance, is the tale of Mr Teal, a space travel insurance agent whose life is so mechanised that nobody notices he's dead:
And here's the tale of a woman brought to hospital by her boyfriend, who tells the staff she thinks she's a fox, because the last thing she said was kon, which is the bark of a fox in Japanese. In fact, she was starting to say kondo, which means "next time", and was trying to warn him that next time he cheated on her she'd leave him.
This is a very odd one. A young girl has a much older lover, who keeps her in the lap of luxury, in a room with strange white flowers and a fountain bath. He goes away on a trip, leaving her (totally naked) in the care of his butler. The servant has to relay the news that the old man has died in a car accident, but the young girl already knows it somehow:
There are times I wish I could draw well. I think manga, or the visual novel (The Crib Sheet prefers the term gekiga, or "drama pictures"), has the capacity to be a much higher artform than written-word-only novels. Just about anybody can write, but not so many can write and draw with talent. So it seems unfair that we generally rank visual novels lower than literary novels.
Japan tends to observe this hierarchy less. When Tomoko Miyata was visiting Berlin recently, she told us that her favourite writer is the mangaka Yoshiharu Tsuge. He's still alive, but hasn't made any new manga since 1986. Here are a couple of rather remarkable films I found on YouTube, in which a fan has animated still Tsuge manga in a superbly weird, almost psychedelic style:
I think it's the capacity of drawing to evoke -- better than photography, film, or the written word -- parallel worlds which both resemble our world and don't that I like so much. That plus the fact that a single auteur-creator, sitting at a kotatsu table, can produce these worlds with very few resources except time, effort, skill and imagination. And possibly the fact that the manga industry has something abject and underground about it, rather like the world of indie record labels (the Wikipedia entry on gekiga basically says they were to Japan what rock was to the US). Is it too late for me to learn to draw and switch careers?
And here's the tale of a woman brought to hospital by her boyfriend, who tells the staff she thinks she's a fox, because the last thing she said was kon, which is the bark of a fox in Japanese. In fact, she was starting to say kondo, which means "next time", and was trying to warn him that next time he cheated on her she'd leave him.
This is a very odd one. A young girl has a much older lover, who keeps her in the lap of luxury, in a room with strange white flowers and a fountain bath. He goes away on a trip, leaving her (totally naked) in the care of his butler. The servant has to relay the news that the old man has died in a car accident, but the young girl already knows it somehow:
There are times I wish I could draw well. I think manga, or the visual novel (The Crib Sheet prefers the term gekiga, or "drama pictures"), has the capacity to be a much higher artform than written-word-only novels. Just about anybody can write, but not so many can write and draw with talent. So it seems unfair that we generally rank visual novels lower than literary novels.
Japan tends to observe this hierarchy less. When Tomoko Miyata was visiting Berlin recently, she told us that her favourite writer is the mangaka Yoshiharu Tsuge. He's still alive, but hasn't made any new manga since 1986. Here are a couple of rather remarkable films I found on YouTube, in which a fan has animated still Tsuge manga in a superbly weird, almost psychedelic style:
I think it's the capacity of drawing to evoke -- better than photography, film, or the written word -- parallel worlds which both resemble our world and don't that I like so much. That plus the fact that a single auteur-creator, sitting at a kotatsu table, can produce these worlds with very few resources except time, effort, skill and imagination. And possibly the fact that the manga industry has something abject and underground about it, rather like the world of indie record labels (the Wikipedia entry on gekiga basically says they were to Japan what rock was to the US). Is it too late for me to learn to draw and switch careers?
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
nvrmnt2besocold on 2009.11.26 at 01:38
Exhausted from the muses whispering within my head
They abscond with the handprints of where I’ve been
To reassemble the patterns that I’ve left for
Willful angels as they prepare their descent
The lonesome sea churns at my dismay
Yet I’m not quite lacking apathy
A color coded virus one might say
A splinter caught inside the wrong vein
But paper cuts aren’t much compared
To the deep, cold slice
Of a switchblade emerging from that gaze
To my left, the lines in the wall converse with me
The warmth of artificial light penetrating my skin
With time unused I’ve discovered
If you reverse the sequence of expressions
The finale of a narrative will have developed a fresh meaning
That poignant appearance will rapidly begin disappearing
Notice taken by the stability of mirrored imaging
I’ve given permission for my phantom to continue stealing
The peelings of a rusted, tattered armor I managed to stay asleep in
So long
Too long
Until by a clatter of consistent reverberations
By the power of simple observation
I was awakened
They abscond with the handprints of where I’ve been
To reassemble the patterns that I’ve left for
Willful angels as they prepare their descent
The lonesome sea churns at my dismay
Yet I’m not quite lacking apathy
A color coded virus one might say
A splinter caught inside the wrong vein
But paper cuts aren’t much compared
To the deep, cold slice
Of a switchblade emerging from that gaze
To my left, the lines in the wall converse with me
The warmth of artificial light penetrating my skin
With time unused I’ve discovered
If you reverse the sequence of expressions
The finale of a narrative will have developed a fresh meaning
That poignant appearance will rapidly begin disappearing
Notice taken by the stability of mirrored imaging
I’ve given permission for my phantom to continue stealing
The peelings of a rusted, tattered armor I managed to stay asleep in
So long
Too long
Until by a clatter of consistent reverberations
By the power of simple observation
I was awakened
As promised, here is Part 2.
The Incroyables and Merveilleuses are my favorites, gosh I tell ya. What they wore was once a political statement, but then they gave up on making statements, and that was a statement. Or some such.
stoorree
2003's Oskar Tennis Champion is my first proper album of the new decade, if you see Folktronic as a belated summary of 90s themes. Oskar draws its power from two collaborations with women artists: the Milky album Travels with a Donkey I made with my ex-wife Shazna in New York in early 2002, just before leaving for Tokyo, and the Mashcat mini-album Mashroom Haircat, recorded with Emi Necozawa when I arrived in Japan. What these records share with Oskar is the genre-collision I began to call vaudeville concrete; they were the kind of record that might have emerged if Georges Brassens had worked with Pierre Schaeffer, or Tom Lehrer had studied with Stockhausen.
It's a powerful combination. On the one hand you have the conservative, enduring, folksy appeal of strong narrative lines, universal timeless themes, stories, content. On the other radical, innovative Modernism, and with it a certain elitist formalism, futurism, the shock of the new, the untried, the experimental. How to reconcile them? Well, one method is to do what the brilliant physical, textural cine-clown Jacques Tati did in Mon Oncle and Playtime; present an exaggeratedly pure and dogmatic Modernism whilst making a folksy satire on it. Another might be to do the vaudeville in the songwriting and lyrics, and the concrete in the music by, for instance, bringing in a formalist collaborator -- here, John Talaga, aka Fashion Flesh, the "reproducer" with a license to "fuck things up" musically. In fact -- as the pre-mixed, pre-reproduced Oskar Originals show -- Talaga improved the record no end.
I take the title of Oskar Tennis Champion from an early Tati short. The album is recorded in Tokyo, where I've moved after being shocked by 9/11. The destruction of the WTC hangs over Oskar Tennis Champion, thematically, like a low-flying passenger jet. How could it not? I saw them, those jets, with my own eyes. Well, one of them, with one eye. So how does 9/11 impact on the Oskar album? Because this is a record in which Modernist utopia slips on a banana skin, and 9/11 was modernity slipping on a very big banana skin (religion, the irrational, resentment, the guerilla resistance, self-appointed nemesis, call it what you will).
You know those Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd films where the clown is dangling from the clockface of a 1920s skyscraper, or saved only by the position of an open window when a whole facade crashes down? The collapse of the graph-paper rationality of the World Trade Center seemed like one of those moments -- as in a Tati film, modernity had been challenged by something absurd, insignificant, clumsy, stubbornly human. The irrational, the uncontrollable, a slight change in plan leading to clumsy catastrophe, and slapstick about clumsy catastrophe. In retrospect, it's particularly interesting to me that this theme plays out in Oskar so much on the level of a comedy of gesture and sonics, just as it does in Tati's Playtime:
The retro-Modernist side of the equation involved delving back into the theories of the Russian formalists, and particularly Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie, which I finessed into a concept I called disorienteering. Needless to say, living in Tokyo without speaking Japanese was, itself, a form of disorienteering for me, a time of being pleasantly lost, and a series of irrational episodes played out in a relentlessly Modernist cityscape. The irrational defamiliarization on display in Oskar was a "logical" and "natural" choice for someone in those circumstances.
There's a ton of documentation of the making of Oskar on the Momus website, but let's move on to a track-by-track play-through.
( Oskar track by track... )
Overall, in retrospect, I think Oskar Tennis Champion is a very ambitious and exciting album, funny, provocative and serious, bursting with ideas but also able to be moving and personal, oblique yet also politically thoughtful, provocative and, artistically, richly suggestive. Rather than Folktronic (which is where many of my American listeners took their leave of me), this is the record which would map out my noughties, texturally, conceptually, thematically. I'm actually very proud of it. It also doesn't sound sonically dated to me; I think that by this point I'd arrived at a style that was completely my own. At the same time, the glitch and "aesthetics of failure" stuff does root it in the early 21st century.
Buy Oskar Tennis Champion from Cherry Red (UK) or Darla (US).
It's a powerful combination. On the one hand you have the conservative, enduring, folksy appeal of strong narrative lines, universal timeless themes, stories, content. On the other radical, innovative Modernism, and with it a certain elitist formalism, futurism, the shock of the new, the untried, the experimental. How to reconcile them? Well, one method is to do what the brilliant physical, textural cine-clown Jacques Tati did in Mon Oncle and Playtime; present an exaggeratedly pure and dogmatic Modernism whilst making a folksy satire on it. Another might be to do the vaudeville in the songwriting and lyrics, and the concrete in the music by, for instance, bringing in a formalist collaborator -- here, John Talaga, aka Fashion Flesh, the "reproducer" with a license to "fuck things up" musically. In fact -- as the pre-mixed, pre-reproduced Oskar Originals show -- Talaga improved the record no end.
I take the title of Oskar Tennis Champion from an early Tati short. The album is recorded in Tokyo, where I've moved after being shocked by 9/11. The destruction of the WTC hangs over Oskar Tennis Champion, thematically, like a low-flying passenger jet. How could it not? I saw them, those jets, with my own eyes. Well, one of them, with one eye. So how does 9/11 impact on the Oskar album? Because this is a record in which Modernist utopia slips on a banana skin, and 9/11 was modernity slipping on a very big banana skin (religion, the irrational, resentment, the guerilla resistance, self-appointed nemesis, call it what you will).
You know those Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd films where the clown is dangling from the clockface of a 1920s skyscraper, or saved only by the position of an open window when a whole facade crashes down? The collapse of the graph-paper rationality of the World Trade Center seemed like one of those moments -- as in a Tati film, modernity had been challenged by something absurd, insignificant, clumsy, stubbornly human. The irrational, the uncontrollable, a slight change in plan leading to clumsy catastrophe, and slapstick about clumsy catastrophe. In retrospect, it's particularly interesting to me that this theme plays out in Oskar so much on the level of a comedy of gesture and sonics, just as it does in Tati's Playtime:
The retro-Modernist side of the equation involved delving back into the theories of the Russian formalists, and particularly Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie, which I finessed into a concept I called disorienteering. Needless to say, living in Tokyo without speaking Japanese was, itself, a form of disorienteering for me, a time of being pleasantly lost, and a series of irrational episodes played out in a relentlessly Modernist cityscape. The irrational defamiliarization on display in Oskar was a "logical" and "natural" choice for someone in those circumstances.
There's a ton of documentation of the making of Oskar on the Momus website, but let's move on to a track-by-track play-through.
( Oskar track by track... )
Overall, in retrospect, I think Oskar Tennis Champion is a very ambitious and exciting album, funny, provocative and serious, bursting with ideas but also able to be moving and personal, oblique yet also politically thoughtful, provocative and, artistically, richly suggestive. Rather than Folktronic (which is where many of my American listeners took their leave of me), this is the record which would map out my noughties, texturally, conceptually, thematically. I'm actually very proud of it. It also doesn't sound sonically dated to me; I think that by this point I'd arrived at a style that was completely my own. At the same time, the glitch and "aesthetics of failure" stuff does root it in the early 21st century.
Buy Oskar Tennis Champion from Cherry Red (UK) or Darla (US).
nvrmnt2besocold on 2009.11.24 at 22:01
Synthetic water droplets
Form upon my cheeks
As they drank the youth from my hands
I was left with cracked skin and a dried soul
Under endless cotton clothing
I still can’t seem to keep the chill from my bones
Without a connection, a whisper
A momentary lapse of a decision
That tingle in the center of my chest is my religion
A blood red cloud, a poison followed by my existence
For humanity I’ve set a place on a balance beam of recognition
Either they all look the same or they stay different
Unique has been only a matter of opinion
I’m an expert at dismantling the pieces
Of distress and grievance
Kept myself at bay from any kind of feeling
From people who react without reason
What’s an eye for an eye when both are missing?
I’ve given up on attempts of fixing the resisting
Condensing words back into my head
But from my lips they have a habit of slipping
Could I still stand to be an open book when
I am no longer relentless at permitting?
Can I follow through with my beliefs when
With each person they keep on twisting?
Form upon my cheeks
As they drank the youth from my hands
I was left with cracked skin and a dried soul
Under endless cotton clothing
I still can’t seem to keep the chill from my bones
Without a connection, a whisper
A momentary lapse of a decision
That tingle in the center of my chest is my religion
A blood red cloud, a poison followed by my existence
For humanity I’ve set a place on a balance beam of recognition
Either they all look the same or they stay different
Unique has been only a matter of opinion
I’m an expert at dismantling the pieces
Of distress and grievance
Kept myself at bay from any kind of feeling
From people who react without reason
What’s an eye for an eye when both are missing?
I’ve given up on attempts of fixing the resisting
Condensing words back into my head
But from my lips they have a habit of slipping
Could I still stand to be an open book when
I am no longer relentless at permitting?
Can I follow through with my beliefs when
With each person they keep on twisting?
tresjolie9 on 2009.11.24 at 21:39
nvrmnt2besocold on 2009.11.24 at 20:48
Night shifts and graveyards has been mainly my time spent,
For my fear of the living is greater than of the dead.
For my fear of the living is greater than of the dead.
Graffitis in Trujillo City (In front of an Internet Coffee)
Posted byyelinna in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
traveling_pics on 2009.11.23 at 22:08
Current Location: Trujillo - Perú (August 2008)
Current Music: Amr Diab - Awedony
And a little of Photoshop 7 this time! (Can you guess where?)
I used to do travelogue podcasts fairly regularly. They're collected here, but there hasn't been a new one since January 2007, because the recorder I used to use stopped working. But in Warsaw I made a nice big juicy long one in which I rave about the city's Stalinist architecture, interview my fellow artistes at the Song Is You festival, look at some art, throw some bouncy balls down a street, get a headache, eat cold herring in apple sauce, and run into members of design group Åbäke.
Warsaw Podcast (mp3 file, 67 mins 22 secs, 33MB)
Above you see some of the details referred to in the walky-talk -- a decorated communist-era building (now a Pizza Hut) near the Central Square, some funerary patisserie (that's what the window looked like to me, anyway). Below you see the forecurl style I was sporting as a tribute to Kantor (excellent video of The Dead Class under that link), and a local Victorian-style dandy.
And finally some of the pretty, Disneyfied architecture of the old town, and Kajsa and Benjamin from Åbäke.
Warsaw Podcast (mp3 file, 67 mins 22 secs, 33MB)
Above you see some of the details referred to in the walky-talk -- a decorated communist-era building (now a Pizza Hut) near the Central Square, some funerary patisserie (that's what the window looked like to me, anyway). Below you see the forecurl style I was sporting as a tribute to Kantor (excellent video of The Dead Class under that link), and a local Victorian-style dandy.
And finally some of the pretty, Disneyfied architecture of the old town, and Kajsa and Benjamin from Åbäke.
Who should I run into at breakfast this morning in the Hotel Metropol, Warsaw, but Kajsa and Benjamin from Abake? Swedish Kajsa is the cover star of my Ocky Milk album, and French Benjamin is also part of music fashion label Kitsune. They told me they'd come to Warsaw to visit the artist Pawel Althamer, and started describing his Common Tasks project to me.
Like Abake (who mount socially-oriented conceptual projects like repairing park benches or setting up plant exchange schemes, and describe it as "design"), Althamer makes social interventions. For Sculpture Munster he made a path leading into the middle of a barley field, for instance. Common Task involves him dressing up a group of his Warsaw neighbours (he lives in a somewhat Stalinist tower block) in sci-fi gold suits and flying them (sometimes in a gold-painted Boeing 737) to various utopian locations: the Atomium in Brussels, Brasilia, or to Mali to meet the Dogon tribe.
Listening to Kajsa and Benjamin describing this over breakfast, I experienced "comparative visit envy". I'd come to Warsaw to sing (dressed up in a pair of spectacles with forecurls attached, as it happens). They'd come for a studio visit with this very interesting artist.
But actually Pawel Althamer had been a part of my visit too. As you'll hear when I post an hour-long podcast of my Warsaw wanderings tomorrow, I spent a while in front of a video of his yesterday at the CSW art museum. In 1997 Althamer selected a group of homeless people and got them to undress, hold hands, and dance naked in a ring in an empty white cube gallery space. I spent a minute or so describing the flabby bodies as they crossed the screen one by one. I didn't realise they were tramps; what interested me was how their middle-aged sag made it difficult to tell men and women apart.
A decade later Althamer would have dressed his tramps in gold foil and sent them on a golden plane to witness wonders.
Like Abake (who mount socially-oriented conceptual projects like repairing park benches or setting up plant exchange schemes, and describe it as "design"), Althamer makes social interventions. For Sculpture Munster he made a path leading into the middle of a barley field, for instance. Common Task involves him dressing up a group of his Warsaw neighbours (he lives in a somewhat Stalinist tower block) in sci-fi gold suits and flying them (sometimes in a gold-painted Boeing 737) to various utopian locations: the Atomium in Brussels, Brasilia, or to Mali to meet the Dogon tribe.
Listening to Kajsa and Benjamin describing this over breakfast, I experienced "comparative visit envy". I'd come to Warsaw to sing (dressed up in a pair of spectacles with forecurls attached, as it happens). They'd come for a studio visit with this very interesting artist.
But actually Pawel Althamer had been a part of my visit too. As you'll hear when I post an hour-long podcast of my Warsaw wanderings tomorrow, I spent a while in front of a video of his yesterday at the CSW art museum. In 1997 Althamer selected a group of homeless people and got them to undress, hold hands, and dance naked in a ring in an empty white cube gallery space. I spent a minute or so describing the flabby bodies as they crossed the screen one by one. I didn't realise they were tramps; what interested me was how their middle-aged sag made it difficult to tell men and women apart.
A decade later Althamer would have dressed his tramps in gold foil and sent them on a golden plane to witness wonders.
My paper journal is full. Upon re-reading it I am mostly embarrassed, which must mean I've changed since I beginning it in 2004. I agonized a lot, while I was a nanny, over being a writer, whether I was a writer, that sort of thing. The concern disappears after I change jobs. Writing seemed the only way out of that tangle, and in a way, I guess it was.
My new journal has no lines - I repurposed an old sketchbook that I bought during my even more awkward anime phase, the phase wherein I began to teach myself to draw. Recently I've been considering practicing drawing again, if only to even out all the awful pseudo-manga-style my doodles are stifled with. I don't have a natural eye, but I probably have a bit of something that could be cultivated.
Hans has been in Philadelphia this weekend to see some indie wrestling with his brother and with my sister's husband. I like Chikara well enough, but not enough to encroach on their dudes' weekend. Besides, someone needed to take care of our poor, sick car. I spent the weekend getting a new tire on the car and begging and borrowing the help ofauberginegal's dad in figuring out just what is wrong with this thing.
Will there ever be a day when I go to Half-Price books and find a copy of the Dictionary of American Regional English? Because I want that day to be today.
Quick, said the bird...did yoga today for the first time.auberginegal is my new French partner. Amy is a HERO and came into work with me last week to volunteer. My sister's Christmas present is on the needles. Hans and I are healthy. I am going to make apple dumplings for Thanksgiving in Lancaster, apple dumplings that look lovely in the book but that I will surely destroy. I am trying to spin and crochet each week.
Oh! Oh oh oh oh oh. I forgot, I am having a giveaway tomorrow morning on Folk and Fairy. Visit!
My new journal has no lines - I repurposed an old sketchbook that I bought during my even more awkward anime phase, the phase wherein I began to teach myself to draw. Recently I've been considering practicing drawing again, if only to even out all the awful pseudo-manga-style my doodles are stifled with. I don't have a natural eye, but I probably have a bit of something that could be cultivated.
Hans has been in Philadelphia this weekend to see some indie wrestling with his brother and with my sister's husband. I like Chikara well enough, but not enough to encroach on their dudes' weekend. Besides, someone needed to take care of our poor, sick car. I spent the weekend getting a new tire on the car and begging and borrowing the help of
auberginegal's dad in figuring out just what is wrong with this thing.Will there ever be a day when I go to Half-Price books and find a copy of the Dictionary of American Regional English? Because I want that day to be today.
Quick, said the bird...did yoga today for the first time.
auberginegal is my new French partner. Amy is a HERO and came into work with me last week to volunteer. My sister's Christmas present is on the needles. Hans and I are healthy. I am going to make apple dumplings for Thanksgiving in Lancaster, apple dumplings that look lovely in the book but that I will surely destroy. I am trying to spin and crochet each week. Oh! Oh oh oh oh oh. I forgot, I am having a giveaway tomorrow morning on Folk and Fairy. Visit!
Please recommend me one poem that I should not die without reading.
Or, perhaps one poet?
Or, perhaps one poet?
nvrmnt2besocold on 2009.11.22 at 14:43
I saw ghosts in my dream.
It's strange. My sister can see them, my nieces can see them, my cousin can see them sometimes and my mom can feel and see things too.
I kind of feel like I got the short end of the stick. I can feel things sometimes and hear or see things once in awhile but not anywhere as close as the rest of them.
It seems like all the females in my family just have it.
Maybe I'm trying too hard. Or maybe I'm just not listening.
Either way I'm glad I went over to my sisters last night. I feel better about my grandpa and just in general. She understands people and reminded me to take everything I hear with a grain of salt. Even from family.
I like how foggy it is out today. I wish it was warmer so I could go outside and meditate.
It's strange. My sister can see them, my nieces can see them, my cousin can see them sometimes and my mom can feel and see things too.
I kind of feel like I got the short end of the stick. I can feel things sometimes and hear or see things once in awhile but not anywhere as close as the rest of them.
It seems like all the females in my family just have it.
Maybe I'm trying too hard. Or maybe I'm just not listening.
Either way I'm glad I went over to my sisters last night. I feel better about my grandpa and just in general. She understands people and reminded me to take everything I hear with a grain of salt. Even from family.
I like how foggy it is out today. I wish it was warmer so I could go outside and meditate.
Does anyone know a good place in the east of singapore (preferably near bedok or marine parade) that processes 120 film at an affordable price? I can't google anything! (please reply!)
-Laura (:
-Laura (:
nvrmnt2besocold on 2009.11.21 at 18:02
Slept away the day with no sunlight to see
Dreaming of a young girl who said she will one day be with me
What a strange dream. She was maybe 9 - 12 years old and kept saying how one day she's going to find me.
At first I found myself on a boat then in a car with some mobsters who were friends with my dad picking him up from a hotel I've seen before in my dreams. Then we're in California, driving to somewhere and my mom starts driving and gets into a minor accident. It turns out she somehow knows the person she hit from school and in the car with us we have some celebrities so it all turns out okay. That's when the little girl appears and follows me throughout the rest of my dream.
I'm a little bummed I spent the whole day sleeping. It's been awhile since the last time I went a day without sunshine. My true night owl self is emerging again.
Dreaming of a young girl who said she will one day be with me
What a strange dream. She was maybe 9 - 12 years old and kept saying how one day she's going to find me.
At first I found myself on a boat then in a car with some mobsters who were friends with my dad picking him up from a hotel I've seen before in my dreams. Then we're in California, driving to somewhere and my mom starts driving and gets into a minor accident. It turns out she somehow knows the person she hit from school and in the car with us we have some celebrities so it all turns out okay. That's when the little girl appears and follows me throughout the rest of my dream.
I'm a little bummed I spent the whole day sleeping. It's been awhile since the last time I went a day without sunshine. My true night owl self is emerging again.
